The village. [Translation from the original Russian text by Isabel Hapgood] (14 page)

1 The Little Russian nickname for the Great Russians.—

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2 YaroslafT the Great, son of Prince Vladimir, 1016-1054.

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3 A Turkish tribe which migrated from Asia to Eastern Europe. They came into collision with the Russians at the end of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth.—

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4 A Lavra is a first-class Monastery. Here it refers to the famous "Catacombs" Monastery.— trans.

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a wooden cup, with a kopek in the bottom, while with the other he incessantly changed the position of his deformed leg—which was bare to the knee, withered and unnaturally thin, burned black by the sun, and covered with a thick growth of golden-hued hair—as if it did not belong to him, as if it were a mere object. There was no one in their vicinity; but the lad, with his close-cropped head thrown back, stiff from the effects of the sun and the dust, displaying his thin, childish collar-bones, and paying no heed to the flies which settled on the excretions of his nostrils, drawled drowsily, painfully, and without ceasing:

"Take a look, ye mammas, See how unhappy, how miserable we are! Akh, God grant you, mammas, Never to suffer so!"

And Kuzma confirmed him: "That's so, that's right!"

When he had conquered his intoxication and come to his senses, Kuzma felt that he was already an old man. Since that trip to Kieff three years had elapsed. And, during that space of time, something extremely important had indubitably been effected within him. How it had been effected, he himself did not even attempt to define. Life during those three years had been too abnormal—his own life and the life of the community. Of course, he had understood while still in Kieff that he would not remain long with Kasatkin, and that ahead of him lay poverty, the loss of even the semblance of manhood. And so it came to pass.

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He managed to scrape along through two more jobs, but under very humiliating and oppressive conditions: eternally half-drunk, slovenly, with voice turned hoarse, permeated through and through with the reek of cheap, strong tobacco, making herculean efforts to conceal his unfitness for business. Then he fell lower still; he returned to his native town, and ran through his last kopeks; he spent his nights all winter long in the general room of the lodging-house of Khodoff, whiled away the days in Avdyeef's eating-house in the Women's Bazaar. Out of these last kopeks many went for a stupid caprice, the publication of a little volume of verses—after which he had to stroll about among the patrons of Avdyeef's establishment and force his booklet on them at half-price.

But even that was not all: he came near turning into a buffoon! Once, on a frosty, sunny morning, he was standing in the bazaar near the flour shops and gazing at a barefoot beggar cutting up antics before Mozzhukin the merchant, who had come out on his threshold. Mozzhukin, drowsily derisive, with a face resembling the reflection in a samovar, was chiefly interested in a cat which was licking his polished boot. But the beggar did not stop. He thumped his breast with his fists and, humping his shoulders, began in a hoarse voice to declaim:

"He who drinks when he is already drunk, Plays the part of a wise man. . . ."

And Kuzma, his swollen eyes beaming, suddenly cut in:

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"Then long live jollity, Long life to good liquor!"

And an old woman of the petty burgher class, who was passing by—she had a face like that of an aged lioness—halted, cast a sidelong glance at him, and, elevating her crutch, remarked distinctly and maliciously: " Tis likely you don't know your prayers as well as that!"

Lower than that there was no place to fall. But precisely that was what saved him. He survived several attacks of heart disease—and immediately stopped getting drunk, firmly resolving to undertake the simplest, most laborious sort of life; to hire, for example, an orchard, a vegetable-garden; to purchase, somewhere in his native county, a bee-farm. Fortunately, he still had a hundred and fifty rubles left.

At first this idea delighted him. "Yes, that's capital," he said to himself with that mournful ironical smile which he had acquired so long ago. Tis time to go home!" And, of a truth, he needed a rest. It was not very long since that vast agitation had begun, both within him and round about him. But it had already done its work. He had become something very different from what he had been previously. His beard had turned completely grey; his hair, which he wore parted in the middle, and which curled at the ends, had grown thin and acquired a rusty hue; his broad face, with its high cheek bones, had grown darker and leaner than ever. His observing, sceptical mind had grown more keen. His soul had been puri-

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tied, had become more unhealthily sensitive, although he was able to conceal the fact behind the serious and, at times, even severe look of the little eyes under brows which almost met across his nose. He had completely pulled himself together, and had begun to think less of himself, more of those round about him. Nevertheless, he longed to go "home" and rest: he craved work to his liking.

V

IN the spring, several months before the reconciliation with Tikhon, Kuzma heard that a garden in the village of KazakofT, in his native district, was to be leased, and he hastened thither. It was a remote spot, with black loam soil, not far from the place where the Krasoffs had first taken root.

It was the beginning of May; cold weather and rain had returned after a hot spell; gloomy autumnal storm-clouds sailed over the town. Kuzma, in an old overcoat and without goloshes over his broken calfskin boots, was trudging to the railway station beyond the Cannon-makers' Suburb, and, shaking his head and screwing up his face from the effects of the cigarette held in his teeth, with hands clasped behind his back under his overcoat, he was smiling to himself. A dirty little barefoot boy ran up to him with a pile of newspapers and, as he ran, shouted briskly the customary phrase: "Giniral strike!"

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"You're behind the times, my lad," said Kuzma. "Isn't there anything newer?"

The small boy came to a halt, with flashing eyes.

"The policeman has carried the news off to the station," he replied.

"All hail to the constitution!" said Kuzma caustically, and pursued his course, skipping along through the mud, past fences darkened by the rain, past the branches of dripping gardens and the windows of lopsided hovels which were sliding down hill, to the end of the town street. "Wonders will never cease!" he said to himself as he went leaping along. "In former days, with such weather, people would have been yawning, hardly exchanging a word, in all the shops and eating-houses. But now, all over the town, they do nothing but discuss the Duma, riots and conflagrations, and how 'MurontzefF 1 has given the prime-minister a sound rating.' Well, a frog does not keep its tail very long!" The fireman's band was already playing in the town park. A whole company of kazaks had been sent. And the day before yesterday, on Trading Street, one of them, when drunk, went up to the window of the public library and made an insulting gesture to the young lady librarian. An elderly cabman, who was standing near by, began to reprove him, but the kazak jerked out his sabre from its scabbard, slashed the cabman's shoulder, and, cursing violently, rushed down the street in pursuit of the people who were walking and driving past, and, crazed

1 Muromtzeff.

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with fear, were flying to the first shelter which presented itself.

"The catskin man, the catskin man, He fell down beneath a fence!" 1

piped up some naughty little girls, in their thin voices, after Kuzma, as they hopped from stone to stone, across the shallow stream of the Suburb.

"When he skins cats, he gets the paws!"

"Ugh, you little wretches!" a railway conductor growled at them. In an overcoat that was dreadfully heavy even to look at, he was walking in front of Kuzma, and he shook a small iron box at them. "Why don't you pick on some one of your own age?"

But one could judge from his voice that he was restraining his laughter. The conductor's old, deep goloshes were crusted with dried mud; the belt of his coat hung by a single button. The small bridge of planks along which he was walking lay askew. Further on, alongside the ditches flooded by the spring freshets, grew stunted bushes. And Kuzma gazed cheerlessly at them, and at the straw-thatched roofs on the hill of the Suburb; at the smoky and bluish clouds which hung over them, and at the reddish-yellow cur which was gnawing a bone in the ditch. In the bottom of the ditch, his legs straddled far

X A rhyme in the original. The "catskinner" collects hides throughout the countryside, for conversion into "furs."—

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apart, sat a petty burgher, in a waistcoat over a cotton-print Russian shirt. His widely opened eyes looked white in his face, which, scarlet with effort, stared upward in an awkward, stupid grin. When Kuzma came opposite him, he said, out of sheer clumsiness: "Is it you our little girls are taunting? Why, those little imps learn effrontery in their infancy!"

" Tis you yourselves who teach them," replied Kuzma, with a frown. "Yes, yes," he said to himself, as he ascended the hill, "a frog does not keep his tail long!" On reaching the crest of the hill, inhaling the damp wind from the plain and catching sight of the red buildings of the railway station in the midst of the empty green fields, he again began to smile faintly. Parliament, deputies! Last night he had returned from the public park, where, in honour of a holiday, there had been an illumination, rockets had soared aloft, and the firemen had played "Le Toreador" and "Beside the brook, beside the bridge," "The Maxixe" and "The Troika," shouting in the middle of the galop, "Hey, de-ear one!" He had returned home and had started to pull the bell at the gate of his lodging-house. He had pulled and pulled the rattling wire—not a soul. Not a soul anywhere around, either—only silence, darkness, the cold greenish sky in the West, beyond the square at the end of the street, and, overhead, storm-clouds. At last, some one crawled forward behind the gate, clearing his throat. He rattled his keys and grumbled: "I'm lame in my underpinning—"

"What's the cause of it?"

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"A horse kicked me," replied the man; and, as he unlocked and opened the gate, he added: "Well, now there are still two left."

"The men from the court, you mean?"

"Yes."

"But don't you know why the judge came?"

"To try the deputy. They say he tried to poison the river."

"What, the deputy? You fool, do deputies meddle with such things?"

"The devil only knows what they'll do."

On the outskirts of the Suburb, beside the threshold of a clay hut, stood a tall old man wearing leg-cloths. 1 In the old man's hand was a long staff of walnut wood. On catching sight of a passer-by, he made haste to pretend that he was much older than he really was. He grasped the staff in both hands, hunched up his shoulders, and imparted to his countenance a weary, melancholy expression. The damp, cold wind which was blowing from the fields agitated the shaggy locks of his grey hair. And Kuzma recalled his own father, his own childhood.

"Russia, Russia! Whither art thou dashing?" Gogol's exclamation recurred to his mind. "Russia, Russia! Akh, vain babblers, you stick at nothing! That's the best answer you can make: The deputy

1 About three-quarters of a yard of heavy homespun crash is wrapped over the foot and leg in lieu of a stocking, and confined in place by the stout cord or rope with which the slippers of plaited linden bark are tied on.— trans.

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tried to poison the river.' Yes, but who is responsible? First of all, the unhappy populace—and unhappy they are!" And tears welled up in Kuzma's little green eyes—welled up suddenly, as had often happened with him of late. Not long ago he had strolled into Avdyeeff's eating-house, in the Woman's Bazaar. He had entered the courtyard, ankle deep in mud, and from the courtyard ascended to the first storey—"the Gentry's Department"—by a wooden staircase so stinking, so rotten through and through, that it turned even his stomach—the stomach of a man who had seen sights in his day. With difficulty he had opened the heavy, greasy door, covered with scraps of felt and tattered rags in place of a proper casing, and provided with a pulley-weight fashioned from a brick and a bit of rope. He was fairly blinded by the charcoal vapour, the smoke, the glare of the tin reflectors behind the little wall-lamps, and deafened by the crash of the dishes on the counter; by the talking, the clatter of the waiters running about in all directions, and the repulsive uproar of the gramophone. Then he passed on to the most distant room, where there were fewer people, ate at a small table, ordered a bottle of mead. Underfoot, on a floor soiled with the trampling of feet and with spittle, lay slices of lemon, eggshells, butts of cigarettes. And near the wall opposite sat a long-limbed peasant in bast-slippers, smiling beatifically, shaking his frowsy head, and listening to the shrieking gramophone. On his small table were a small measure of vodka, a small glass, and cracknels. But

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the peasant was not drinking: only wagging his head and staring at his bast-shoes.

All of a sudden, becoming conscious of Kuzma's gaze riveted upon him, he opened his eyes wide with joy, raised his wonderfully kind face with its waving reddish beard. "Well, so you've flown in!" he exclaimed, in delight and surprise. And he hastened to add, by way of justifying himself: "Sir, I have a brother who serves here—my own brother."

Blinking away his tears, Kuzma clenched his teeth. Ugh, damn it, to what a point had the people been trampled upon, beaten down! "You've flown in!" That in connection with Avdyeeff's establishment! And that was not all: when Kuzma rose to his feet and said: "Well, goodbye!" the peasant hurriedly rose to his feet also, and out of the fulness of a happy heart, with profound gratitude for the light and luxury of the surroundings, and because he had been addressed in a human manner, quickly answered: "No offence meant!"